Chapter 9: The Marsh Cottage

The crowd closed around me before the guards could move.

The fishwives dragged a fish cart across the road.

The goose boy opened both his baskets, and forty angry geese went honking into the horses' legs.

A horse reared and threw its rider into the cheese stall.

"Highness!" Garran roared from the mill gate. "This way!"

A hand caught my wrist, warm and ink-stained.

Corwin pulled me through a gap between two stalls and down the bank to the mill race.

A flat punt lay moored in the reeds, and the miller sat in the stern with a pole.

"Get in, you foolish girl," she said.

We dove in, and she shoved off.

Behind us I heard Brogan shouting, and Catriona screaming something shrill about her circlet.

Garran appeared on the bank with the archer boy slung over his shoulder.

"Go," he called. "I'll lose them in the hills."

"Garran!"

"I'll bring him to the Hearing, Highness!" he shouted. "Wolf Moon! Don't be late!"

The punt slid out into the current, and the village fell away behind the reeds.

We poled for an hour through the marsh, with the sun going down red behind the bulrushes.

At dusk the miller put us ashore on a little hump of dry ground and pointed.

"Old wolf-keeper's cottage. Nobody's lived there since the last blight. Stay off the road."

"Thank you," I said.

"Thank me with a crown," she grunted, and she poled away.

The cottage was one room, with a clay hearth and a sagging bed and a roof that mostly kept the rain out.

Corwin lit a fire with two sparks and a handful of dry reeds.

I stood in the middle of the room dripping marsh water and shaking.

It was not the fever.

It was the other thing.

The silver mark on my wrist was burning, bright and hot, and so was the one on his.

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